How does magic work?

When we start to work with deliberate creation, I think it’s really important to understand the essence of where we are probably starting from and what we are trying to move towards. Essentially, most of us are starting from having been trained in thinking about the world in very material ways and we’re really moving towards working with magic.

The simplest way of explaining magic is that it’s when something happens where you can’t automatically see the link between cause and effect (although a Shaman could – but more about that later!). You need some extra cash, so you take on some overtime at work and you earn a bit more. That’s a material approach involving simple cause and effect. But think of this example, You’re job hunting, so you send off a hundred CVs and get no replies, but then you stop to help someone push a broken down car and find that they work in the field you’ve been desperately trying to break into, know of an opening you can apply for and give you an introduction. If something like that happened, you can’t automatically see what brought you two together in that very moment, but you would absolutely know that magic was at work!

The challenge that many of us face when we start to work with deliberate creation is that, because we do live in a material world, most of the solutions that we’re taught are material approaches. If we want something, we are trained to take well trodden courses of action that can bring their own kind of material results, like sending off a CV to a company we want to work for. But as deliberate creators, what we are trying to do is do our bit in the material sense and then move beyond that to the realm of magic.

Magic works in a way that is totally opposite to how the material world works. Oftentimes, magic is at work just when it looks like everything is going wrong in an ordinary view of the world. Magic seems to happen out of the blue. It disrupts the smooth, planned running of our day. By its nature, it defies logic and rationality – or to be more accurate, what we have been taught is logical and rational. One of the major contributions of the late philosopher Wittgenstein was the recognition that every culture has its own idea of what is logical and rational, which is why so many early anthropologists struggled to shed the shackles of Western thought when they first began to study Shamanistic cultures.

Magic is by its nature out of the ordinary, and when we start to work with deliberate creation, what we’re actually trying to do is find a way to be able to cross the boundaries between the mundane and the mystical in the same way that Shamans cross from our ordinary everyday world into non-ordinary reality and back again. But we can get half way across and then give up and turn back just as the magic was actually happening.

Let’ s say you’re working with drawing love into your life. You’ve written out your list of perfect partner attributes, wrapped it around Rose Quartz crystal and tied it with red ribbon. You’ve done your candle magic and created a vision board. Then you get invited to a party. You think, this is it! This is where it’s going to happen! You spent ages getting ready and go along with a huge sense of anticipation, walk into the room, look round and feel your hopes drop as you don’t see any tall, dark, gorgeous strangers. It’s actually a really good party but you don’t really enjoy it because you can’t move beyond the breaking of your expectations. You go home, take your vision board and candles and magical scroll and dump them in the bin and give up.

What you can’t see in that moment, beyond the limits of your imagination, is how, in a month’s time you’re going to be asked to work late, which means you’re going to be running for the bus after work to try and get to your evening class, and you’re going to trip up and land slap bang in front of someone who is going to help you up and you’re both going to realise in an instant that there’s a huge amount of chemistry between you.

When you are working with magic, you are going beyond non-ordinary reality into a space where what you need to do is expand your mind to be able to work with infinite abundance rather than trying to bend the enormity of the universe according to the limits of an ordinary perception.

That’s why I suggest that when you are working with Cosmic Ordering or the Law of Attraction, it’s more powerful to set your intentions in a way that leaves the detail to the universe, as that’s how you create a magical space into which things can flow that will amaze you.

You are the creator of your experience and you get to do it how you want. If you’re working some career magic, for example, just think about the difference between saying, ‘I want a job with X company at X salary with X hours where I get to do X’ and saying, ‘Okay Universe, blow me away!’

So whenever you are setting a deliberate intention, it’s always good to do a double check and ask yourself the question, ‘Where am I building in limits, and where am I opening doors of possibility?’

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